In the Muck
by Lvl2DragonTamer
Summary: The bard was still shattered. And Morrigan felt the same as when she had fallen from the tallest tree.


_A/N: Quick vignette, nothing but a drabble. Caused by recent heartbreak and an overexposure to Florence and the Machine._

* * *

><p>Morrigan stirred the ashes of the fire.<p>

_Such idiots,_ she remembered herself thinking the first time she stepped into a Fereldan town. She could have cried for them if she weren't so disgusted. _They can't honestly think that this is good. They're clearly unhappy. Their whole lives, slaving away in the muck to afford a house in the muck so that they can spawn muck-covered little children and the whole thing repeats forever and ever._

The bard tightened the strings of her lute, ran her fingers across the sinew, coaxed out a dissonant twang. She met Morrigan's gaze from under tan eyelashes—the bard looked down almost instantly, away. Most days Leliana was bubbling with empty conversation about dresses and shoes (and obvious excuses to stare at Morrigan's breasts) but since the death of Marjolaine the girl hadn't been right. Maybe it was as obvious to her as it was to Morrigan how alike the witch and her old bardmaster were, after seeing them stand next to each other, after watching Marjolaine cut with her tongue and a tilt to her head—a practiced move, radiating disdain, one Morrigan wore like a second skin.

Morrigan buried herself in magic, the arcane arts, the ways of the wilds, and so stood separate to that muck-covered life and those putrid hovels. Leliana buried herself in music, in the ways of the body, in the stories of her people, in the fables of the Maker, her delusional quest for her god. And so they both stood so tall, so accomplished, above the Fereldan mud. Morrigan tore apart deer with her jaws, rather than bake bread. Leliana would sooner multiply the loaves.

But the bard was still shattered, her fingers rolling across her lute like dancing skeletons, the ghost of a woman behind every word, every breath she inhaled. And Morrigan felt the same as when she had first tried to take raven form and had fallen, down and down from the highest tree.

"Is everyone this stupid, then?" Morrigan asked the woman. Leliana's fingers twitched, the melody died. She readjusted her hand on the neck of the lute and stared at the space between the witch's eyes.

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone is stupid enough to do—this—" The apostate waved her hand at the night, hoping that the intuitive bard would read the gesture like a book and recognize Morrigan's failing, the one thing the witch was too terrified to say. She did not.

"I'm—falling—" Morrigan dug her nails into her arms, the memory of her crashing against branches as she spiraled, down, down, her wings too bruised to open, playing over and over again down her spine.

"Even the gods do this." Leliana said.

Morrigan looked at the bard through the haze of treetops and a memory of the wheeling sky. "You only believe in the Maker."

"I only worship the Maker, but..." Leliana's arms trembled for a second around the body of her lute—it looked, for that instant, like she had wanted to pull it into an embrace against her chest. "Even the gods, they felt this. The Maker, too. You can see it in the sunsets and hear it in the wind."

The broken woman turned back to her lute, caressing the neck and the body like the lover she would never touch again. Morrigan turned from the musician's grief and fell into the form of a wolf.

She had tasted dragon blood and knew the ways of the wilderness. She breathed secrets no other human would ever know, she was strong and proud and she ran in the ways of the Old Gods. But they had never told her that this, sleepy slurs and nightly mergings and quiet looks, would grow into something so strong, so terrible, something that would tear her from the sky. They had never told her that the day would come when all she would want to do would be to bake bread and wake up covered in muck every day, if it meant watching his eyes open beside her own.

She ran until the camp was nothing but scent on the wind, and she howled.


End file.
